The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

OF ANKH-MORPORK
(with Stephen Briggs)
    THE DISCWORLD MAPP
(with Stephen Briggs)
    A TOURIST GUIDE TO LANCRE – A DISCWORLD MAPP
(with Stephen Briggs and Paul Kidby)
    DEATH’S DOMAIN
(with Paul Kidby)
    NANNY OGG’S COOKBOOK
(with Stephen Briggs, Tina Hannan and Paul Kidby)
    THE PRATCHETT PORTFOLIO
(with Paul Kidby)
    THE LAST HERO
(with Paul Kidby)
    THE CELEBRATED DISCWORLD ALMANAK
(with Bernard Pearson)
    THE ART OF DISCWORLD
(with Paul Kidby)
    WHERE’S MY COW?
     
    THE UNSEEN UNIVERSITY CUT-OUT BOOK
(with Bernard Pearson)
    GOOD OMENS
(with Neil Gaiman)
    STRATA
    THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN
    THE UNADULTERATED CAT
(cartoons by Gray Jolliffe)
     
    also available in audio/CDpublished by Victor Gollancz
    published by Samuel Frenchpublished by Methuen Drama
    published by Ebury Presspublished by Oxford University Press

THROUGH THE WARDROBE INTO DISCWORLD
    IT WAS THE WIT OF TERRY PRATCHETT THAT FIRST ATTRACTED ME to the books, and which then led to my pushing past the fur coats and finding myself in his magical world - thankfully devoid of Turkish delight and talking beavers.
    One of the big questions about Discworld for a newcomer is ‘Where do I start?’ This is a tricky one. For every diehard fan of Rincewind there’s an advocate for Small Gods. For everyone who loves the ‘Witch’ or ‘City Watch’ books, there is another who prefers the ‘one theme’ books, such as Soul Music and Moving Pictures. I, as it happens, kicked off with Mort.
    Terry writes fantasy - but his books are grounded firmly in reality. They contain heroes (not many), cowards, villains, bigots, crooks, the strong-willed and the weak-willed. Sometimes they are human. A lot of the time they are not. The series extends across many genres and deals with real issues. But Terry uses his wit to sharpen his pen; the humour in the books can be dark, and it can be so corny you may groan out loud as you read him on the train.
    In producing this book, I have not tried to extract every single gag and witty exchange from the series. There are too many, and to do that, I might just as well have tied a set of the novels up with string and added a tag: ‘The Complete Wit of Pratchett’.
    What I have done is re-read every book in the canon, and pull out the extracts that appealed to me. Sometimes they’ll be a page long, sometimes they’ll be a single line of text. Sometimesa really good gag has been omitted because it needs the buildup that the novel can give but which would take too long to set up in a book of quotations. Here and there, I’ve had to change the odd word, or omit the occasional phrase, to help the quotation work outside its context in the novel.
    The extracts are presented book by book, in the order in which they were published. Each book’s section starts with the cover blurb (which in most cases was written by Terry), to give you the same sort of idea of the novel’s plot as you’d get if you were browsing the shelves of your local bookstore.
IT’S A BIG BOOK
DO I HAVE TO READ IT ALL AT ONCE?
    Don’t panic: you don’t need to sit and read this book section by section, from cover to cover. This is more of a ‘dip into’ book. If you’re new to Terry’s novels, this cornucopia of snippets may inspire you to go out and buy and read one - or more - of them. Oh, and the maps, diaries, audio books, scarf… As for you keen Discworld readers, what I hope is that, as you browse through this book - by torchlight under the covers last thing at night, smeared with sun lotion on a beach in Greece, on a long coach trip, sat on the privy - you’ll find some of your favourite pieces from the Discworld canon. I haven’t had the luxury of doing my research in any of these exotic locations - but I enjoyed the opportunity to wander once more through the roughly four million words which currently make up the series … around twice the complete wordage of the Bible and all Shakespeare’s plays.
    Stephen Briggs
      www.stephenbriggs.com / www.studiotheatreclub.com  

 
    O N a world supported on the back of a giant turtle (sex (sex unknown), a gleeful, explosive, wickedly eccentric expedition sets out. There’s an avaricious but inept wizard [Rincewind], a naive tourist [Twoflower] whose luggage moves on hundreds of dear little legs, dragons who only exist if you believe in them, and of course The Edge of the planet…
    How it all began:
    In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the